You might think that social conservatives, especially those in the so-called "pro-life" crowd, would welcome the use of a new vaccine that is virtually 100% effective against two deadly strains of cervical cancer that account for 70% of such cancer deaths and that kill over 3,700 women each year. Unfortunately,…
Let's do a thought experiment. Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang some bananas by a string from the ceiling and place a ladder underneath it. Before long, one of the monkeys will go to the ladder and try to climb towards the bananas. As soon as…
Behold the incredibly evil Grinch!
“I know all about him,” you might think. “He’s the guy who almost dumped Christmas over the cliff. Thank goodness that he saw the light in the nick of time.”
In the classic Dr. Suess story, the Grinch’s heart grew three times right there by the edge of the cliff. But it was at that same precise location that the true evil of the Grinch manifested itself. How so? Let me tell you!
It was at the edge of the cliff that the Grinch realized that Who villagers had just about learned a huge lesson that night. They had almost learned that they did not need all those Christmas baubles. They learned that forging a meaningful community didn’t require decorations, sugary treats or glittery whatnots. They realized that maintaining a strongly-knit community could be accomplished without the things money buys.
As already mentioned, the residents of Who-ville held hands and sang together, their angelic voices drifted up to the precipice where the evil Grinch (small “e”) was disrupted in his evil (small “e”) quest to dump the Christmas kitsch where it actually belonged: into some far-away God-forsaken place. If the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day, though, his capacity for evil simultaneously grew tenfold.
[This was predicted by Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” Arendt wrote that it was thoughtlessness, not intentional or premeditated acts, that predisposed people to engage in the greatest evils.]
The Grinch’s (capital “E”) evil impulses then took …
In a recent post (http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=166), I discussed God's attractive nuisance in His garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge. Let's take that discussion one step farther. Not only did God plant his deadly tree smack in the middle of His garden (bad garden design), not only did He fail to…
CNN reported last week that the US military has been ignoring its own rules concerning the deployment of soldiers known to be mentally ill. Last year alone, the practice contributed to the suicide deaths of 22 US soldiers, which was a stunning 20% of all non-combat fatalities. I wish someone would explain…